The 62nd Venice Film Festival proved one point above all
others. We need no longer listen to that whiskery wisdom, heard in Hollywood
and points north, south, east and west. “They don’t make good roles for
women.”

Actresses at Venice this year trounced the truism. They trounced the
actors too. The women had the greater talent; no less interestingly they had
the better roles. Helen Mirren, MerylStreep, Isabelle Huppert and Fiona Shaw – to name
but four – ate all the scenery they were served in THE QUEEN, THE DEVIL WEARS
PRADA, NUE PROPRIETE and THE BLACK DAHLIA, while the men in those films, and
in many more, struggled for scraps.

Which of us did not think immediately of the famous Botticelli painting of Venus and Mars? A post-coital god
of war lies in snooze mode in a spring meadow, a young paragon bereft of his
vital essences, while a complacently twinkling Venus, semi-recumbent at his
side, looks on at her conquest.

So it was at Venice. So it will be at next year’s Golden Globes and
Oscars. There is a crisis in masculine identity today. (Remember where you
read it first). Men have been proved incompetent as leaders, boring as
superheroes – witness this year’s ragged returns from comic-strip
blockbusters – and tedious as role models. Now they are up for redundancy as
actors.

When Tom Cruise’s services were suspended by Paramount last summer, it
was a seismic signal to the world. Hollywood’s numero-unotestosteroner was deemed a prancing twerp, with a
propensity for capering on sofas and insulting feminine colleagues. His
furniture-wrecking stunt was on TV’s OPRAH, in supposed celebration of his
new love for Katie Holmes. Shortly before or after this – no one can remember
an exact order of events when the events themselves are daft beyond caring –
he brought the full weight of his Scientological
authority, based on the scriptures of L Ron Hubbard, to his condemnation of
Brooke Shields for taking post-partum antidepressants.

Enough of Tom Cruise. And enough of Superman. And enough of George W
Bush, primus inter primates. Instead of these failed males, abusing their
loaned omnipotence, the movie world has turned to Johnny Depp,
camping it up as an incompetent brigand in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, to
henpecked techno-twerp Adam Sandler in CLICK! and –
beyond them – to performers who make no bones about the fact that they are
not men at all. They are, to put it bluntly, women.

At Venice, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth
II and MerylStreep as
Miranda Priestly, a truth-based New York magazine editor putting the fascism
into fashion, each cut a more convincing figure as a commander-in-chief than
the C-in-C now ruling the western world. Whereas some years ago we might have
viewed Her Majesty QE2 and Anna Wintour (the
American Vogue editor-in-chief who inspired THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA) as,
respectively, a chilly monarch and a dislikable
tyrant of the typeface, today we warm to their stylish obduracy, their icy politesse, even the way each woman camouflages her
occasional cockamamie caprice as cool rule and consistent agenda.

For, there are three sub-clausal reasons for the plate-shift in
present-day comparative gender perceptions. First, everyone wants Mrs
Thatcher back, the last western leader who had a strong but commonsense
worldview and the clarity of mind to implement it. Secondly, women are less
swayable – for the most part – by claptrap creeds like Scientology and
suicide terrorism. Thirdly, women have taken over a historic number of top or
next-to-top jobs in the present day, from managing companies to editing
newspapers to running offices of state. And they show that they do not fall
flat on their faces or have hysterics or run off and buy hats: they manage
themselves just as well as, possibly better than, men.

Mirren
and Streep prove that women can command. The iconic
image in THE QUEEN is that of Tony Blair, a nominal head of state, kneeling
before Her Majesty, with no hint of incongruity in this tableau of
ascendancy. The iconic refrain in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is Streep’s sovereign “That’s all”, a guillotine sigh, at
once lofty and feminine, that cuts short any conversation with a subordinate
that has ceased to interest her.

These are women in control. But as Isabelle Huppert in NUE PROPRIETE
and Fiona Shaw in THE BLACK DAHLIA proved at Venice, women out of control can
be just as compelling – and more compelling, once again, than their
corresponding menfolk. In other words, when they
succeed, modern women are more interesting than men. And when they fail, they
are also more interesting than men.

Huppert is tremendous in the role of a divorced mother warring with
inheritance-greedy sons in NUE PROPRIETE. Huppert’s specialty as an actress
has been to take the notional passivity of femaleness and turn this ‘negative
capability’ into a positive, into an expressiveness varied, supple and
absorptive. At first she seems a victim in this clever French domestic drama,
shot like a fly-on-wall documentary or reality TV saga. Yet it becomes
clearer and clearer that victimhood has its own
vanquisher prowess. Not so much passive aggression, more an anger that seems
pure, virgin-born and self-directed, like an arrow that finds its own way
from the quiver to the bow to the target.

(Some years ago Huppert played Mary Stuart in Schiller’s play at
London’s National Theatre and again made a hero of a victim, a protagonist of
a persecutee).

Fiona Shaw in THE BLACK DAHLIA acts everyone else off the screen,
possibly off the map. Brian De Palma’s film of James Ellroy’s
1940s-set Los Angeles detective novel needs a little madness. It has needed
it for an hour before Shaw appears: we have tramped knee-deep in faux-baroque
story complications and hardboiled Chandlerian (we
wish) dialogue. We need a saviour and we get one.

As the rich, mentally disturbed, dipsomaniacal wife of a
Scottish-American millionaire living in a Hollywood mansion – possibly a
murderess too – Shaw could have gone over the top. But she is not content to
do that. She goes over the roof, over the biosphere, over the moon and
planets. Her trippy drawl, woozy gestures, dazed
eyes indicating a damaged brain, above all her rubato
delivery – now presto, now druggy-lento – are spellbinding.

She suggests that women go to pieces far more interestingly than men.
(Shakespeare suggested this with Lady Macbeth). She suggests too that some
movies pick the wrong character(s) to put centre screen. Or else a great performer
can make us think they do. A De Palma/Ellroy
melodrama about Shaw’s character, her backstory,
her battiness, her raison de vivre, her raison de boire, her raison de tuer
(there, we’re giving the plot away): now, that would be a movie we’d circle
blocks to see.

In despair at finding a male to equal the females, the Venice jury
gave this year’s Best Actor prize to Ben Affleck in HOLLYWOODLAND. Ben
Affleck! Yesterday he was the face that sank a hundred movies from all walks
of Tinseltown (PEARL HARBOR, JERSEY GIRL, GIGLI).
Today he is apparently better than anyone else with a double-X chromosome.

It proves the point, doesn’t it? For the record, there was no
better male performance at Venice than Affleck’s. And he played nothing other
than a failed Superman: the true-life actor George Reeves, who in the 1950s
was TV’s first Man of Steel before he killed himself, his career having
failed to take off from living-room fame.

Crashed comic-strip heroes, dying white males – this is the new
carpeting of the new cultural landscape, wall to wall, horizon to horizon.
Across this battleground walk the women who know to act, how to rule, how to
command, how to conquer. Or how to command our attention even when they are
doing none of these things.

The actor is dead. Long live the actress. At least until the next
revolution.

Anyone for Hillary?

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.